Cloud Atlas: A New Trailer and a Divisive Premiere

Sadly, my attempts to make this blog cutting edge failed rather miserably when I went away for last weekend out of internet range and then came back to find that I had great difficulty finding time to sit down and write. What I missed being able to blog during that time was that, first of all, Warner Brothers has now released a shorter 2:30 trailer for Cloud Atlas. It’s mostly the same things that we’ve already seen, but with a couple of other clips – most tantalising of all (at least to me as a classical music buff) is the small snippet of the Cloud Atlas Sextet that can be heard playing on a record at the beginning of the trailer.

And I read somewhere that that is Ben Whishaw (who plays the composer Robert Frobisher in the 1930s story) as the record store attendant. Not that you can really easily confirm these things. IMDB still doesn’t have a full list of who’s saying who. Or are they just letting us have some surprises when we watch the film? I’d like to hope so. Needless to say, I don’t think this trailer is going to make the film any clearer for newbie audiences out there, so I’m not sure who it was pitched at. Also, sadly, it leaves off M83’s “Outro”, which so powerfully drove the last couple of minutes of the long trailer with its hyper-emotionalism. The first trailer neatly broke down into three movements – I. Drama II. Action Film III. Emotional Rollercoaster. By chopping off the third movement and only leaving the first two, I don’t think this new trailer is doing anybody any favours. Anyway, none of that matters too much now, because the film has had it’s premiere just last weekend at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) so dozens of critics have been able to post their reviews at the same time. And the result? A completely divisive experience, it seems. What everyone does seem to agree on is that, when the film was finished, the filmmakers got a 10-minute ovation. But maybe that was just group peer pressure in action. Because the results were completely mixed. There was some absolute savaging.

“Cloud Atlas” is like the entire “Matrix” trilogy in micro. It starts out absolutely brilliantly, then segues into a pretentious slog. Jordan Hoffman at film.com. Tom Tykwer and Andy and Lana Wachowski wanted to make a movie unlike any other, and they certainly did: Cloud Atlas is a unique and totally unparalleled disaster. Calum Marsh at slantmagazine.com

At 163 minutes Cloud Atlas carries all the marks of a giant folly, and those unfamiliar with the book will be baffled. Yet it’s hard to wholly condemn the directors’ ambition – this is fast-paced and cleverly assembled, with the best of the performances shining through the prosthetics (Hugh Grant makes great play of the clutch of villains he’s dealt). The Tykwer/Wachowski collective offer everything here. Chances are there’s something in the hodgepodge for you.

Cloud Atlas is going to be far and away the most divisive film of 2012, but I don’t think it’s possible to fault it for shortage of chutzpah. David Mitchell’s 2005 novel – pipped to the Booker prize by Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, though in any other year it would surely have won – is a virtuoso plate-spinning exercise, an addictive feat of nested storytelling, and a sprawling treatise about human capacities for removing and reclaiming freedom. It’s amazing they’ve tried to adapt it at all, let alone as a single, near-three hour picture. In the hands of co-writers and directors the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer there was a danger of it mutating into a monstrous ballooning folly. So even more amazing is that it strays frequently in that direction but never quite bursts.

But then there were reviewers who could understand why others might not like the film, but nonetheless, thought the film was amazing.

And my personal favourite review so far, with the great title “CLOUD ATLAS Is Overwhelming, Odd And Utterly, Completely Amazing”:

Cloud Atlas is sometimes silly, and it’s sometimes pretentious and it’s sometimes overstuffed. But every single one of those things, to me, is a positive. It’s an exceptional piece of filmmaking, one of the bravest works I have ever seen. (badassdigest.com)

So really, the only question is – why do we have to wait so long to see it in cinemas down here in Australia?

About Me

Matthew Hodge

I work in the classical music world in Sydney, Australia. As well as doing interesting data stuff, I'm also interested in the question of how to make classical music mainstream again. I love books, music, films and the smile on my kids' faces when I come home at night.

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